Compliments of the Aidhor. 



W2m 



ADDRESS 



AT THE 



COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 



June 26, 1889. 



BY 



JOSIAH PARSONS COOKE, LL.D. 



tel 



ADDRESS 



AT THE 



COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 

June 26, 1889. 



BY 



JOSIAH PARSONS COOKE, LL.D. 



vy 



?v: 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. President and Brethren of the Alumni: — 

T THANK you with all my heart for this 
kind reception ; but as I look round me 
and remember how few there are in this 
large assemblage who have not borne the 
infliction of my lectures, I am abashed to 
think how widely my weaknesses and short- 
comings must be known. It is fortunate 
for us old teachers, that time so far alters 
the perspective under which the incidents 
of college life are seen that our mistakes 
become less prominent, and our devotion 
to truth and duty more evident, as we ad- 
vance in years. Before another generation 
has passed, I trust that old Father Time 
will have dealt as graciously with the college 



work of to-day as he has with our own 
weak endeavors in the past; but it has 
seemed to me that many of her friends 
have of late been criticising Alma Mater 
very much in the same spirit which her 
students showed to their teachers in former 
times, exaggerating her failures and min- 
imizing her successes. In a community of 
nearly two thousand young men it must be 
that offences come ; and he can have known 
little of human nature in opening manhood 
who thinks that by any system of restric- 
tions he can build a wall around the Col- 
lege high enough to keep evil out; and, 
however much he may dread the conflict, 
who does not know that no force of char- 
acter can be attained and no manly virtue 
won except by meeting the enemy and slay- 
ing him ? 

The discreditable stories which have been 
so widely circulated about our College have 
brought upon us the scrutiny of a whole 



army of reporters; and, whatever of truth 
or of falsehood there may have been in 
the sensational paragraphs they have pub- 
lished, of this I am sure, that few societies 
of men, however sacred their object, could 
have borne the scrutiny as well. When 
I have indignantly repelled the scandals, I 
have been told that I knew nothing about 
that phase of college life. Thank God I 
do know nothing about it ; and I am in con- 
stant association with hundreds on hundreds 
of young men who know as little about it 
as I do. We do not expect to solve the 
problem of evil at Harvard in this genera- 
tion ; but there is this very marked difference 
between the evil influences of to-day and 
those of only a few years back. Then the 
evil was everywhere pervasive. The classes 
were so sm.all that all the members were 
brought into more or less intimate associa- 
tion, and one could not avoid meeting the 
hateful forms of vice, however greatly he 



might be repelled by the sight. Now as- 
sociations are determined to a far greater 
extent by mutual tastes and affinities; the 
bad influences are confined to a limited 
class, and the great majority of our students 
in passing through college see as little of 
degrading vice as they would at their homes. 

Several years ago, an anxious mother 
consulted me about sending her son to this 
College. The son was anxious to study in 
our Laboratory, but the mother feared the 
evil influences of the place. Nevertheless 
the boy came, as I afterward learned, in con- 
sequence of my representations, graduated 
w^th highest honors, and is now one of the 
most promising of the younger members of 
his profession. The mother followed her son 
to Cambridge. After she had lived among 
us for some time, she said to me one day : 
" I am so much delighted with this place. 
Things are so different from what I expected. 
I was told such horrid stories, and not one 



word of them is true." We have at least 
one sincere advocate, who has been con- 
vinced by experience; and there are num- 
bers of young men who graduate from 
Harvard every year as guileless as this 
earnest woman's son. 

My friends, I can assure you that the 
great danger of our dear College at the pres- 
ent time is not over dissipation, but over 
work. Sixty thousand dollars cannot be dis- 
tributed in prizes every year without pro- 
ducing an enormous strain; and those of us 
who are directing the workers know how 
intense the activity is. We may know little 
of the evil around us, but we do know a 
great deal of the good. We know of lofty 
purposes and of earnest endeavor. We know 
of perseverance under great discouragements, 
and of victories won against heavy odds. 
We know of self-control and of self-devotion. 
We know of Qiristian duties habitually prac- 
tised, and of truth and right manfully up- 



8 

held; and we maintain that the character 
of a community of scholars is to be judged 
by such traits as these, and not by the oc- 
casional lapses of its weaker members. 

Moreover, I am not one of those who think 
that a man is necessarily condemned because 
he is born with a gold spoon in his mouth, 
or that educated leisure is an unmitigated 
evil. The College has done a good work in 
educating rich men, and it owes a great part 
of its present influence to the noble use 
which many of its Alumni have made of in- 
herited wealth. Such men are educated more 
by association than by direct instruction ; and, 
as a former President of the College once 
said, they gain something if they merely rub 
their backs against the College walls; and 
if this was true in the past, how much more 
is it true in the present, when the intel- 
lectual life of the College is so much more 
active, the standard of scholarship so much 
higher, and the opportunities of cultivating 



special tastes so greatly enlarged. You can- 
not expect of such men the asceticism of an 
anchorite, or the plodding diligence of a 
scholar; but the University owes them an 
education, and the duties and obligations 
are not wholly on one side. 

During the last twenty-five years the life 
at the University has been rendered safer 
and more healthy, in every respect, by a 
greatly increased enthusiasm for learning, 
which extends to almost every department 
of this large institution. In no one respect 
has the improvement in the College been 
more striking than in this ; and probably 
no officer of the College has had better op- 
portunities of observing the change than 
myself. For forty years I have lectured 
to the successive Freshman Classes, begin- 
ning with the Class which entered in 1849; 
and many of the older men around me will 
remember the boyish pranks which in their 
college days not infrequently amused the 



lO 

class, and greatly tried the temper of the 
teacher. The lecture was always an up-hill 
work, — a duty to be enforced on the one 
side, a task to be endured on the other. 
The lecturer was always waiting on dis- 
turbance, the class always waiting on de- 
liverance. Not only was there no general 
enthusiasm, but the first suspicion of such 
a thing in a college lecture-room would 
have been regarded as a dangerous prece- 
dent, alike compromising the dignity of the 
teacher and violating the traditions of the 
place. Now, although the Classes have so 
outgrown the accommodations that not only 
all the seats, but all the approaches to my 
lecture-room, are crowded almost to suffo- 
cation, a more orderly, a more attentive, or 
a more enthusiastic audience cannot be 
found. This change is due not simply to 
our elective system, but far more to the put- 
ting away of those petty restrictions which 
were formerly a constant menace, and erected 



II 



an impassable barrier between the teacher 
and the taught. We no longer, like the 
Irishman, stand aloof with a chip on the 
shoulder, and dare any of the boys to knock 
it off; but we invite confidence, and receive 
it, and our relations with the students is not 
that of taskmaster and toiler, but that of 
guide and friend. Had our worthy Presi- 
dent done no more than break down that 
old middle wall of partition, he would for 
this great feature of his administration alone 
deserve the everlasting gratitude of this com- 
munity. And let me entreat you, my breth- 
ren, not to allow any one to reinstate this 
wall, or even to lay the first brick in its 
reconstruction. 

Most of our sister institutions are strug- 
gling with hobbledehoydom still. Only a 
few days ago, one of our distinguished 
graduates, and a highly valued Professor in 
another New England College, said to me: 
" Cambridge men do not appreciate the ad- 



12 



vantages they have gained by setting their 
students free from petty restraints. Treat 
men as boys and they will act as boys. 
With us the boyishness first breaks out in 
the chapel, and then extends to all the class- 
rooms. It belittles all our work, and damp- 
ens all our enthusiasm." My friends, in an 
institution of learning like this, you cannot 
prize too highly the ennobling virtue of en- 
thusiasm. To awaken it is to make the boy 
a man. To fail to arouse it, at least in some- 
thing, is to miss the great end of education. 
But such virtue cannot be had without cost 
Enthusiasm implies of necessity freedom; 
and who in this New England, after a cen- 
tury's experience, is not willing to incur the 
risk and pay the cost which freedom entails ? 
Finally, brethren, while noble character 
is the crowning grace of education, scholar- 
ship is the brightest jewel in this crown ; 
and you may well ask. Has learning kept 
pace with privilege ? But in attempting to 



13 

answer this question I find myself in the 
dilemma of the learned commentator who 
had devoted a chapter to the snakes of 
Iceland. He could find no snakes, and I 
can find no comparison. The scholarship 
of to-day rests on a level so much higher 
than that of twenty-five years ago, that there 
is no common measure. I will confine my- 
self to my own department, of which I have 
accurate knowledge, and of which I may speak 
unreservedly, because it has so broadened out 
that only a small part of the instruction now 
devolves on the Director. Besides the very 
large class, before referred to, which attended 
the elementary lectures, there were actually 
working in the Chemical Laboratory last year 
more students than were comprised in the 
whole College of my day, and the contribu- 
tions to chemical science which will soon be 
published, as the result of the year's work of 
students as well as of teachers, will fill more 
than one half of the annual volume of our 



American Academy. A recent writer in the 
Atlantic Monthly, discussing "Why our Stu- 
dents go to Europe," pays us what he evi- 
dently regards as a high compliment in say- 
ing, " Now the chemical course at Harvard 
equals that in most German Universities." 
Our own students who have gone from the 
Laboratory to study abroad will tell you, as 
they have told me repeatedly, that, whatever 
advantages may be gained by association with 
men of special attainments, there is no Uni- 
versity in Germany, or elsewhere, at which 
the instruction is at once so broad, so full, 
and so thorough as at home. How does this 
compare with recitations from Stockhardt's 
Chemistry, illustrated by popular lectures? 

Fellow Alumni, our attention has been 
so often and so loudly called of late to the 
shady side of college life, that, whatever opin- 
ions you may have formed, I am sure you 
will not blame me for inviting you on Com- 
mencement day to bask for a few minutes 



15 

in its sunshine. At such a time we can only 
meet assertion with assertion ; but I have 
spoken solely of what I do know, and if any 
one is not convinced I invite him, following 
the example of the anxious mother, to come 
and dwell among us and partake of our life. 
Obviously I am no pessimist, but also I am 
no optimist. The members of this great 
family are all frail human souls. Evil is ever 
present with us, as it was with our fathers and 
will be with our children. We cannot escape 
the curse. But we have faith in truth and 
right, and will fight the good fight to the end. 

" O yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood." 

We all boast the same intellectual parent- 
age. You for the most part have gone out 
into the world and found a career elsewhere. 
I am one of the few who have always stayed 
by the homestead since I was first received 



i6 

into the brotherhood with the Class of 1848. 
For nearly half a century I have known 
the dear old Mother as well as a devoted 
son possibly could ; and let me assure my 
brothers who have come home to keep this 
feast, that during her long life our Alma 
Mater was never so worthy of our admira- 
tion and veneration, of our love and devotion, 
as she is this day. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 895 514 3 




